What is money laundering in cryptocurrency?

The goal of money laundering in cryptocurrency is to move funds to addresses where its original criminal source can’t be detected, and eventually to a service that allows cryptocurrency to be exchanged for cash — usually this means exchanges. If that weren’t possible, there would be very little incentive to commit crime involving cryptocurrency.

How much money does a cryptocurrency address receive in 2020?

Furthermore, expanding this group further, Chainalysis says that 1,867 addresses received 75% of all criminally-linked cryptocurrency funds in 2020, a sum estimated at around $1.7 billion. "This level of concentration is greater than in 2019," Chainalysis researchers said in a report published last week.

Are illicit addresses facilitating money laundering?

In fact, illicit addresses account for under 10% of total cryptocurrency received for many of these addresses, even moreso below the $10 million mark. This suggests that the money laundering those addresses facilitate could simply be inadvertent and due to shortcomings in the compliance programs of the nested services controlling them.

How much money is laundering on the blockchain?

But while you'd expect that the money laundering resulting from such a broad spectrum of illegal activity to have taken place across a large number of services, Chainalysis reports that just a small group of 270 blockchain addresses have laundered around 55% of cryptocurrency associated with criminal activity.